Friday, May 18, 2007

Look! Something else for me to write about intermittently

In a potentially wasted effort to get myself writing again, I thought I would add some thoughts on a non-Tech sport that I am following with growing interest and education, Mixed Martial Arts (MMA.) Most people out there still know it only as Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and even then they only remember the hardly any rules, no weight class, Royce Gracie demolishes everybody early days of the product. In fact until I started watching The Ultimate Fighter 3 on SpikeTv, even I had no clue how much the whole affair had evolved from spectacle to actual sport. In fact most people only know the UFC, but arguably the best pound for pound fighter in the world fights for the Japanese Pride Fighting Organization (Fedor Emelianenko).

So anyway, I’m hoping to post some more opinions on upcoming UFC\Pride events. TUF 5 episode analysis and maybe a few other tidbits here and there to try and get myself back into the groove of writing regularly without resorting to random internet meme discussions. I’m not much for recruiting so I still won’t post too much there either.

2 Comments:

Sort of. UFC is in the final stages to purchase Pride, but everything I've read and heard is that Zuffa wants to keep two distintive brands for the time being and that fighters will keep a contract with one or the other. What it will make easier is the ability to put together super fights and challenge matches between the two organizations since they'd literally just be moving money from one pocket to the other.

Pride is still a predominantly Japanese brand though the internet has increased its popularity in the US. There are also different rule sets between the two (ground kicks, knees, and stomps are allowed in Pride, but not UFC while elbows are allowed in UFC, but not Pride.) Plus the whole standard ring vs. caged octagon difference.

Dana White has more than once said that they don't have a sport until there is a unified rule set and hopefully a mixture of the Pride and UFC rules will allow for that to happen in the near future.

The biggestnews out of all of this is that we might get to see Fedor fight either Randy Couture or that Gonzaga kid that knocked out Cro Cop in the near future.